Assistive Robotics Laboratory

Research themes: The mission of ARL is to develop agile wearable robots to enhance locomotor abilities across daily activities and further the quality of life for humans. To achieve this goal, we are investigating control and optimization techniques to design and optimize assistive strategies that are invariant across users and tasks and implementing these strategies on self-designed, user-friendly wearable devices for experimental verifications.

Lab facility/equipment: The Assistive Robotics Laboratory (ARL) is equipped with essential facilities for conducting human gait analysis experiments. The lab has an instrumented treadmill (Bertec Incorporation) that can measure ground reaction forces between human subjects and the treadmill belt. These two belts can be controlled independently at different speeds to mimic the addition of a perturbation to human walking. The lab is also equipped with a motion capture system (Vicon Motion Systems Ltd, UK) that captures human movement using reflective markers.

In addition, the 8-channel electromyography (EMG) sensors (Delsys, Inc.) allow us to capture and analyze muscle activity. The lab has a bilateral, powered hip exoskeleton (Enhanced Robotics, China) that serves as an experimental platform for studying the performance of different controllers.